About a year ago, an indie sandbox space sim named Xeno Galaxies tried to gather some development money for itself. Sadly, it didn't work out. Now, it's back, and it looks like that year off did it a lot of good.
Check out the trailer from 2013. As you can see, the game was literally Minecraft in space.
And here's the new trailer from a few days ago. To me, the first-person movement stands out in particular—it kinda reminds me of Quake 2 or the first Unreal. It's very fluid.
Apart from the much-improved visuals, Xeno Galaxies now sports voxel-based deformable terrain and fancy new fluid physics. Of course, the block-based ship- and base-building is still there, the randomly generated universe is still there, the RPG elements and the asteroid mining are still there, and so is the old-school FPS action. But it all looks a lot more slick and shiny.
The IndieGoGo project Xeno Galaxies had a year ago tried to collect $90,000, and failed. Well this time around, it's a Kickstarter. And let's face it: the game looks better, the goal is lower, and (arguably) the audience is bigger. It might just make it after all. Here's hoping.
Xeno Galaxies [Kickstarter]
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